Distance educators won’t have to become FBI-style investigators, installing cameras in the homes of online students and scanning fingerprints to ensure that people are who they say they are.
At least not yet.
The recently reauthorized Higher Education Opportunity Act requires accreditors to monitor steps colleges take to verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the course work. Language in the law made some distance educators worry that they would need expensive technology to ensure that other people don’t take students’ tests. Educators feared the cost could endanger programs .
But proposed federal regulations about fulfilling the law, worked out this May, would allow colleges to satisfy the mandate with techniques like secure log-ins and passwords or proctored examinations, according to people involved in the negotiations.
It has been an emotional controversy that touched on cheating, privacy, and Congress’s lingering discomfort with distance education. Some in the field felt they were being held to a higher standard than their peers at brick-and-mortar institutions. And some technology vendors exacerbated the anxiety through “purposeful distortion” of the law, said Fred B. Lokken, an associate dean at Truckee Meadows Community College, in Nevada.
“There were companies who saw a chance here to get their business base by, I think, exaggerating what the HEOA was requiring,” said Mr. Lokken, chair of the Instructional Technology Council, an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges.
Still, while colleges may have dodged an immediate bullet, the issue will be “front and center” in the future, Mr. Lokken said. As identity-verification technology evolves, accrediting agencies will probably require more than simple log-ins and pass codes.
Worries About Identity
At the heart of this debate are a few words in a large bill that Congress reauthorized last year. Congress required colleges to have “processes” establishing that “the student who registers in a distance-education course or program is the same student who participates in and completes the program and receives the academic credit,” according to the Instructional Technology Council.
Once the new student-identification requirements emerged, technology companies like the Acxiom Corporation and Moodlerooms pointed to the law in announcing a new option for colleges to get tough on cheating: an integration of Acxiom’s identity-verification questionnaire into Moodle, the open-source course-management system that Moodlerooms uses.
Other advanced tools colleges can use include the Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
Some college officials saw advantages in the new technologies. Others were wary of privacy issues, though, and still others chafed at the assumption that because the course was online, the person doing the work might really be a student’s mother.
“People were just concerned that our job was going to be moved from teaching to some kind of FBI-like forensics work,” said Jennifer E. Lerner, director of the Extended Learning Institute at Northern Virginia Community College.
She added that “people were resentful of that because no one checks a photo ID when someone walks into a classroom. You call their name, they say ‘here,’ and you assume that that’s who the student is.”
An official from the U.S. Education Department confirmed that the proposed regulations do not require colleges to put in place any new authentication technology beyond a secure log-in and password at this time. Proctored testing is also an option.
Michael J. Offerman, vice chairman of the Capella Education Company, was an industry representative involved in rule-making negotiations. Here’s his bottom line: “For most, if not all of us, that would mean we don’t need to change the way we’re doing verification. But we’ll have to report it now to our accrediting agency.”
For her part, Ms. Lerner argued that proctored testing is “essential” for a program’s quality. “And a lot of institutions are not doing that now,” she said.